A Peek into our previous house

This is the second home we built by ourselves...a lot of sweat equity went into this house...and we lived there for four years...three more than planned! We built the house planning to live there one year then sell and build again. However, I got pregnant and had a very rough pregnancy and after ella was born, we decided to stay.










Our livingroom


I loved my kitchen!





Family Room Downstairs. You could walk out the patio doors to the backyard.













I loved my hammock. I would swing with Ella and Jack.


Our deck where we ate supper every sunny day!

Wanna take a peek at my bathroom before I transform it????

Call me crazy...but one thing I appreciate on other people's blogs is real photos...not those perfectly posed, perfectly coiffed rooms that look as though no one lives there...so with that in mind...I have decided to show you my bathroom before I renovate it. It really is a perfectly acceptable bathroom in the scheme of life...I don't plan on spending more than $200 on this room and I hope when I am finished it will look much better.

So, being a nut for honesty, I decided to share my bathroom with you on a typical day. We use this room to do laundry, for the kitty litter, to access my cleaning supplies for the house, for ella to wash her hands fifty million times a day, I put my makeup on here and of course, we use the loo!

Isn't this an awesome shot of my loo..those are my dried hydrangea from my garden. The wall colour is not bad...kind of a coffee cream colour.

These are my white wooden blinds I recently purchased for $5.00!!!! They were a miscut and even though I had to watch and wait, they finally hit a sale price even I never expected! That is my garage in the background.

Okay, I have four kids...doesn't everyone run out of toilet paper...this is being replaced along with the old heater...My sister informed me that the rust is due to pee pee accidents and not condensation as I had always believed...eeew! The rusting came BEFORE we moved in!

Okay, I can't change the tile right now as it runs into the hallway. However, we are painting the vanity a rich chocolate brown and replacing the counter top. Behind the April Cornell fabric is our kitty litter...

I hope to add some moulding around the doors and drawers to give it clean shaker look. Right now the vanity is just a very plain wood.

Okay, why am I showing you this...it is because of the oil leaks we get from our hinges and to point out the lousy paint job done by the last owners...

And they don't even match! We plan to replace the hinges with new dark bronze hinges to match our new door handles.

A shot of your basic door knob...I can't wait to replace them with my rubbed bronze door knobs...they were one of the more expensive items but worth it!

Odd knob number two!

A pile of clean laundry and a shot of my cheap mirror which I will either replace or frame out but going horizontally and centered under the sink.

These lights boxes are a thorn in my side. We have to remove them, gyprock the openings and reposition the light sockets. If possible, we will remove the whole bulk head if we can. That amazing painting of a sunset was painted by my nine year old son Jack!

Another shot of the sink area. I want to position one light socket over the sink. I have new taps to replace the older ones which I bought three years ago when we were planning to build a new house.

We were preparing to paint our ceiling in this shot.

So, there you have it! I could have waited and taken the photos once I had tidied the room and finished painting the ceiling. But, once again, I remembered to take the photos once we got started. I hope my bathroom doesn't offend you all to much!

Rain, rain go away...

This beautiful painting is by local artist sherri burhoe

This past couple of weeks we discovered that our porch leading out of our basement has sprung a leak! The water gurgles in, fast and furious into our family room through the door. It seems to be coming in where the house foundation and the porch foundation meet...it wasn't poured all at once so there is a definite seperation which has allowed water to leak in. Then we had a record breaking rainfall of 78mm and this added to our mess!

Thankfully, a good friend loaned us a pump (not a sump pump) to remove the water from beneath our sub-floor. We put sandbags around our porch to divert the water, we even made a berm around our sub-floor frame to hold the water in to the one area to allow the pump to suck it away...we have spent many hours with two shop vacs sucking up water and dumping them outside in the pouring rain till the wee hours of the morning. This storm we are experiencing today has been very managable and not as stressful!

Knowing this, we will now have to plan on fixing this asap and this will also include new rain gutter as the rain gutter we have is old, leaks and desperately needs replacing. Part of the problem with the leaking is the fact that the rain gutter leaks in the same spot where the foundation leaks. So, the two are related.

So, I have risen to the challenge of cutting corners and really trying to live our lives more simply...I have always enjoyed decorating my homes on a strict yard sale budget. Our goal of renovating this house reflecting our schedule and budget restraints will be revised once more to fix this issue which takes priority over new siding or new windows.

So, as I sit here on another very windy, wet night...I think of sunny days ahead when we will tackle our porch and rebuild it to be strong and water tight! I am grateful that I have a husband who can do much of the work himself which will save us money and the satisfaction we will get from fixing this very stressful and expensive mess!